What National Whipped Cream Day can Teach us about Content Marketing

Educational and informative emails and newsletters are often undervalued as part of your Content Marketing.

Yes, you will make sales from emails, but you cannot sell to your audience all the time. You need to share marketing content of value too. Educational content. Content that teaches your readers something without asking for anything in return.

But, sometimes we all get writer’s block. There are many ways to inspire you to write articles that will teach, inform and even make your audience laugh. One place that can be great to get inspiration for your content marketing is from … the calendar.  Yes, that is not a typo – even though I make many, I did say, calendar.

Read on to  find 5 websites full of inspiration for writing content for your own marketing. More importantly you will find out what I meant about National Whipped Cream Day!

Okay, so you are now thinking, what the heck is Kathy talking about? How can a calendar give me ideas for my content, for articles, blogs and emails? And even more importantly, what does whipped cream have to do with marketing?

Simple… As I said earlier, there are a ton of special days every year that get noted on the calendars of the world. And these can be a really good place to get inspired for content.

I want to share with you 5 Resources you can use to Create Marketing Content!

Let’s start with the 1st resource…

CalendarDate.com

This website has a list of all sorts of holidays, observance days and more for many countries. This one is really cool. You can change the country to find out what holidays are celebrated in each one. I will note, that this seems to be an American focused website as that country has way more listed than Canada, as an example. But it does cover statutory holidays (like New Year’s Day), observance holidays (like Groundhog day) and religious holidays (like Ramadan and Passover).

Now, this one you may not find as much inspiration for content so much as you might for marketing planning. It is a calendar that will come in handy to know and have noted so you are not sending emails on special days, where more people may not be online versus a regular day.

NationalDayCalendar.com

This is resource #2 and it has a lot of funky dates and days like National Whipped Cream Day, also known as my birthday, January 5th. Who knew I shared my birthday with the founder of Reddi Whip Whipped cream? Now I do.

So how will that help me write an article for my audience? Well, here I am writing about it and now many more people know about National Whipped Cream Day. And how talking about that and calendars can help come up with ideas for your content.

Now… if I were one of my many dietitian clients, I would use National Whipped Cream Day as a segue for an article …

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Okay… we interrupt this article to share the fact that I love using the word ‘segue’. Many people think it is spelled Segway, but that is actually the machine, a Segway you can ride and glide on. According to Merriam Webster, the word segue means “to make a transition without interruption from one activity, topic, scene, or part to another.” ie. He segued smoothly into the next story.

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Anyhow…. If I were one of my dietitian clients, I could use National Whipped Cream Day as a way to segue into a lesson on eating, or not eating, foods like whipped cream. It could be done in many ways… there are the no-diet, intuitive eating dietitians that will say – go for it, but understand what you are doing. Then there are others who might teach you some of the why behind why you want to eat that whipped cream and how it affects your nutrition and health.

Please note I am in no way a dietitian and am not offering any real nutrition advice here! I am offering a way for you to use a day, like National Whipped Cream Day, to teach your audience something connected to whipped cream and the day to celebrate whipped cream’s contribution to the dessert world.

This website also gives you background info on many of these special days. This can be very helpful to add additional info to your content if needed. You can also look up National week and month observations like World Kiwanis Week and Mentoring Month in January and International Days such as International Day of Italian Cuisines on January 17th.

Bonus lesson here: If you are a fan of the tv show, Family Guy, I just gave you the opportunity to say whipped cream 10 times, with your fun emphasis on the H in Whipped (make that 12 times). It’s not quite Cool Whip, but close!

DaysoftheYear.com

This website actually offers up to visitors another great list of fun days of the year. And low and behold, National Whipped Cream Day is listed here too. This site also shares a few more details as the previous one, but has more special days for almost every day of the year. For example, January 5th is also Bird Day!

If you ever wonder why people have websites like this, look at the ads, that is how they make their money. By people doing a search online, finding the page with the ‘list of holidays’ that was probably in the Google Search term and this was a result. The ads are shown to visitors, in hopes they click on them and go to those other pages. (Special Note: This is how SEO – Search Engine Optimization – works. You optimize the website for keywords and phrases so people searching for solutions online will find your website.)

How do you use these sites for ideas… well look at National Mani-Pedi Day (Manicure-Pedicure for those not in the know). If you were a spa like one of my clients, Colours Dartmouth, then this is a perfect way to start a conversation – or an article – that might offer a special sale on Mani-Pedis in celebration of National Mani-Pedi Day.

I hope you are seeing how these calendars can help you create content. Let’s look at #4.

EducationWorld.com Holidays

This is a really good site, because these are not all frivolous days as some of the ones mentioned earlier. This website is geared to educators, but if you are not in that field, there is still a lot of good info to glean from it and use to inspire your own teachings via your blogs or newsletter articles.

Check out April and Administrative Professionals Week. This one shares the date and even ideas on how to celebrate and recognize the Admin professionals. Now, this is geared to school admins – who as we all know really run the schools of the world – but you could use this to recognize your team, or even share other info for your audience to remember why showing recognition and gratitude to team members is important. How it can change the team dynamics and even boost productivity. This would be a great topic for some of my business coach clients who focus on leadership. The ‘special day’ is a way to bring the topic up to your audience in the form of an article/lesson.

UNESCO.org

Yes, even UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) offers a calendar of Internationally recognized days that The United Nations General Assembly designates. They have a list of designated certain “International Days” to mark important aspects of human life and history for days celebrated by the United Nations and its Specialized Agencies.

A couple noted here in this list are ones that some of my past clients always promoted and included in their marketing; ones like International Women’s Day on March 8th. For some businesses including mentions of this special day can bring in very relevant articles that their audience will really connect with. That is the point of offering teaching content and content that educates and informs your readers. The calendars and days can sometimes offer you ideas and inspiration to get writing.

These 5 calendars are ones to make note of and bookmark and save… and there are many others out there, I just wanted to share a few that I use. So, when you are looking for ideas or inspiration for your marketing content… why not include these as a place to check to give you ideas?  And, if you want some ways to save time with your content marketing, this article,  Top 3 Time Saving Tips for your Content Marketing has some of my best timesaver ideas.

So, today, December 27th, as we celebrate Fruitcake Day, a day made for the celebration of the cake that we all seem to find synonymous with a brick, I wish you Happy Fruitcake Day and Happy Writing in 2018!

May 2018 be a year of fun, laughter (I hope this article helps with that!), celebrations of special days and of your successes and more success in the New Year!